Now let us note a significant fact. In each of the situations we have mentioned so far--situations where some evidence exists that Foreign Aid has promoted American interests--there is a common denominator: _in every case, the recipient government was already committed to our side_. We _may_ have made these nations, on balance, stronger and more constant allies, though even that is debatable. But we did not cause them to alter their basic political commitments. This brings us to the rest of the Foreign Aid program--and to the great fallacy that underlies it. Increasingly, our foreign aid goes not to our friends, but to professed neutrals--and even to professed enemies. We furnish this aid under the theory that we can buy the allegiance of foreign peoples--or at least discourage them from “going Communist”--by making them economically prosperous. This has been called the “stomach theory of Communism,” and it implies that a man’s politics are determined by the amount of food in his belly. Everything we have learned from experience, and from our observation of the nature of man, refutes this theory. A man’s politics are, primarily, the product of his mind. Material wealth can help him further his political goals, but it will not change them. The fact that some poor, illiterate people have “gone Communist” does not prove that poverty caused them to do so any more than the fact that Alfred K. and Martha D. Stern are Communists proves that great wealth and a good education make people go Communist. Let us remember that Communism is a political movement, and that its weapons are primarily political. The movement’s effectiveness depends on small cadres of political activists, and these cadres are, typically, composed of literate and well-fed people. We are not going to change the minds of such political activists, or impede their agitation of the masses by a “war on poverty,” however worthy such an effort might be on humanitarian grounds. It thus makes little sense to try to promote anti-Communism by giving money to governments that are not anti-Communist, that are, indeed, far more inclined to the Soviet-type society than to a free one. And let us remember that the foreign policies of many of the allegedly neutral nations that receive our aid are not “neutral” at all. Is Sukarno’s Indonesia neutral when it encourages Red Chinese aggression? Or Nehru’s India when it censures the Western effort to recover Suez but refuses to censure the Soviet invasion of Hungary? Or Nasser’s United Arab Republic which equips its armed forces with Communist weapons and Communist personnel? Is American aid likely to make these nations less pro-Communist? Has it?